Life & Wisdom Quote by Siegfried Lenz

Embarrassment, for Lenz, is less a blush than a moral audit you failed to prepare for. The line pivots on “balance” - a word that carries the dull authority of ledgers, but also the bodily discipline of staying upright. If you can balance, you won’t “come into embarrassment”: you won’t stumble into the humiliating moment when life demands an accounting and you have nothing but excuses.

The phrasing feels slightly off-kilter in English (“To ask oneself never in embarrassment”), which oddly strengthens the point. It reads like an admonition translated from experience rather than polished for effect. Lenz, a postwar German novelist who repeatedly returned to questions of responsibility, memory, and the everyday texture of guilt, writes with the suspicion that history does not only judge nations; it corners individuals in private. The subtext is generational: decades pass, and then the simple question arrives - what did you do with them? Not what did you feel, not what happened to you, but what did you make.

“Ready to balance” implies ongoing preparation, not a one-time reckoning. It’s a warning against drifting, but also against self-deception: keep your books straight while you’re still writing the entries. In Lenz’s world, embarrassment is what replaces catastrophe in peacetime - the quiet shame of having avoided the harder choices. The intent is bracingly practical: live so the future interrogation won’t catch you unarmed.